Ryan On Seven Of Nine

Although Jeri Ryan has moved on to other projects, her memories of working on Star Trek: Voyager are good ones.

Seven of Nine was a outsider character, along the lines of Spock, or Data and that was part of what made her unique. “It was part of watching her looking at humanity from a different, outside perspective,” said Ryan. “She was trying to regain her humanity and relearn it, so she was very child-like in a way.”

Ryan used her experience as a mother of a son to better understand how to play Seven of Nine. “…I used my son, who was two-and-a-half years old at the time, as a model for the character,” she said. “She was like a child, watching things, and when I watched the baby, I saw he did the same thing. His reactions were new, like hers. It’s an interesting thing to see ourselves from a different perspective and not somebody who’s just a different species who’s commenting on humanity. She was somebody who had to learn to embrace it herself and learn all the nuances of it.”

In addition to having that child’s view of humanity, Seven of Nine was also an innocent when it came to sexuality. “That was sort of the innocence of the character which was sort of refreshing and fun. Which is very much in contrast to Tara on Leverage, who was incredibly aware of everything and was not at all adverse to using whatever she needed to use to get to a mark. She would use her sexuality and was very comfortable in her skin. That was really fun and refreshing for me to play because I never really played a character like that.”

Ryan still hears from Star Trek fans, even though Star Trek: Voyager has been off of the air for years. “I still get more fan mail from Star Trek than from any other job I’ve ever had,” she said. “There is no fan base like the Trek people. They are incredibly passionate, incredibly loyal. They’re a pretty amazing group of people. I actually did my first convention in five or six years just this past year and it was fun just to reconnect with them. It was fun to revisit those times.”